let me say affliction is a miserable spec at the moment. the damage is pitiful even with cooldowns popped, and they are a nightmare to heal... compared to self healing of destro or just tankiness of demon form. It is manageable but hardly worth the effort haha

You are wise sir. Warlocks are terrible at tanking damage. Something we've relied on for the past 11 seasons has been gutted. People haven't really noticed yet because Aura of Enfeeblement plus Metamorphosis form really helped cover it up. But the aura is gutted and even Curse of Enfeeblement is nerfed. Warlocks need like -10% to -20% damage taken in Fel Armor, or we need Soul Link baseline, or something. We are very squishy right now.

yeah when we first started playing i cant count on 2 hands the amount of times shin would hold his trinket only to have to use it 3-4 seconds into a stun only to pop another major cd, because he would be brought to sub 25% instantly. this is a result of getting used to warlocks being a tanky class, with great mitigation for nearly 8 years. Now warlocks are a cooldown reliant class with 0 mitigation. I think for a class designed around long term consistent pressure (the 2-3 minute cooldown 1 shot game will only last so much longer) they really need to put some form of mitigation back for warlocks in addition to more passive self healing for affliction. Ember taps alone blow the spec out of the water survivability wise... dont even get me started on meta/aura.

the damage is a totally separate issue, with all his cooldowns popped (AKA Demon soul/trinket) he can make some nice pressure. idk i think the spec needs a little more substantial spread pressure when not backed by cooldowns. then again every damage dealing spec in the game follows this cooldown formula barring mages and maybe shadow priests... silly game, run around 25 mins until someones one shot successfully kills.

he was also miserable that using pets is sooooo bad, the damage the spec does without demon sac is pitiful to be honest at least burst wise

also he hated the damage model of haunt via shard/no shadow bolters.... and malific grasp esp vs mages... while it can make some nice damage vs some classes, vs mages he would get full dots up and line up some grasp opportunities only to have his full row of dots fall off 2-3 seconds later. maybe mage armor nerf fixed this

these are the major complaints i can remember. i have my own complaints i can list for hours on issues with the spec but i dont play a warlock so ill keep those to myself

You are wise sir. Warlocks are terrible at tanking damage. Something we've relied on for the past 11 seasons has been gutted. People haven't really noticed yet because Aura of Enfeeblement plus Metamorphosis form really helped cover it up. But the aura is gutted and even Curse of Enfeeblement is nerfed. Warlocks need like -10% to -20% damage taken in Fel Armor, or we need Soul Link baseline, or something. We are very squishy right now.

Lets think about the whole passive damage reduction mechanics through wow history.

In vanilla warlocks had soul link. Shadow priests, mages or moonkins didnt have their forms or armors reduce damage done on them.

This was okay since sacrifising your pets hp was a bigger deal back then since you only had fel dom.

By time shadow form, moonkin form etc started giving out passive damage reduction, %5 less than what soul link does without having the same consequence (sacrifising your pets hp) but getting pets became easier and easier as a warlock.

Now we are at mop where every class EXCEPT warlocks have passive damage reduction. Makes no sense really. Why would you take our soul link and still keep the other passive damage reductions in game? They could have just nerfed it and made it a %15 reduction or whatever really, but instead they thought "hey lets make soul link work in a really different way and make it a talent"

Now we can die in a deep or shockwave much easier than any other class can unless we pop something.

the point is, what is blizzard doing when hibryds like shadow priest can do by far better the role of aflicction in this exp?

They need to increase the dmg of the UA when its dispelled, give a passive ability to re-summon your pet instant without use any mana (2 min CD, like demo) ,probably increase the % of nightfall, like 7.5 or 10% instead of 5%, and probably give some more dmg to our pet, actually sacrifice should be only viable in pve, since every affliction lock love to play with pet in arena, do some micro, etc, its how it works basically.

I think that this changes could be really good for us, bringing affly a bit more of presence in arena without unbalance pve.

I played destro today, felt really strong tbh. Was doing good damage/burst outside of cd's, even without chaos bolt. Also playing with a shaman puts me at around 72% mastery which means my self heal heals for over 25% per shard which is awsome.

All i want to say in this thread is, why would you bring to the table/arena a class powerful enough to compete like this in Arena without a silence effect a.k.a Demonology not to mention Warlocks now being a physical damage dealer. I mean i tried all 3 specs (not the best at it just a noobie trying to understand how the class works since i spam meet it in arena) and i find Affliction a lot more enjoyable but why would you allow all this random shit flow around in the game and not just fix it like TBC days where every Wednesday there was almost a patch with fixes. How hard can it fucking be..

4. Remove Blood Fear. Replace it with another ability. If removing it is not an option, make Blood Fear only have a 15 yard range.

5. Increase UA dispel damage. Right now, from memory, it crits for about 60-80k, depending on cooldowns. This is simply not enough, and with dispel instantly removing all of our DoTs and Haunt, Affliction needs more protection. Dispelling a Haunted target is currently a no-brainer. Maybe change the Glyph of UA to not remove the Silence portion of the dispel punishment.

Should mention that tremor totem will need to be adjusted as well if blood fear is gone, at least in parenthesis. I know you mentioned exactly that earlier in your post, but still.

Dispel protection can be done not only via damage increase on dispel. Consider returning shard and/or making haunt undispelable. Consider UA dispel also removing buffs from target. Many fun options here and I don't think that a simple increase in backfire damage will be enough. Currently a dispel shuts us down completely until all dots are reapplied which either takes many globals or many shards (and you can basically forget about getting haunt up again). Having dots up is much more important now than it EVER was for our damage, and hence dispel protection is also more important than ever.

We can't really write anything on the forums but it seems to me like you've got everything covered. What we need is passive damage reduction, for coil and howl to be non-talent spells again, nerfing blood fear, nerfing tremor, damage increase on dots, UA fix.

But also we need the whole game to get less burstier. There is so much damage right now that you can die from %100 to 0 in a stun while your healer is blanket silenced. For affliction to be good the game should be less bursty.

I hear ya brodiz. This close to unsubbing for good and being done w/ the game completely. Tired of changing my playstyle/binds around every week when all I want to do is put up some dots. Love how now w/ kil' jeadens my previous binds for my casted spells are now in what I consider bad spots and have to rebind binds I've been using for 5 seasons.